Workshops Overview
All of my workshops are suitable for absolute beginners and people who’ve been creative all their lives and everyone in between!
Map Making –
Turkish Map Fold
We explore the history of maps, mapping elements, design, drawing and lettering while you create your own unique map.
The workshop finishes with you binding your maps using the traditional Turkish Map Fold to produce a pop up map.
Bring an idea with you to work with. In previous workshops we’ve covered holidays, favourite walks, family farms, family trees, well the list is endless.
I have been running this class in various UK locations for five years and each map is a discovery both for the student and myself. You’ll be surprised just how addictive mapping can be and how much you’ll find yourself concentrating on the processes, while still having a fun, I promise you, the two can happen concurrently!
I’ll also be bringing my own maps and a small selection of my own vast collection of maps to the workshop.
The Vegetable Patch of Life
You will create a small artists’ book that holds flowerpots filled with our closest family and friends, seeds of hope, words of wisdom, rays of sunshine, positive thoughts and we’ll also sieve all the negativity into the compost bin!
Walking around your life’s garden we’ll discover ways to create dawn light and calm moonlight into our daily routines. We’ll also work out how to make the grey dull rain filled days have a positive twist to them!
You will be able to work with collage, drawings, and painting, making envelopes, cut outs and pop ups. You can bring pressed flowers from your own garden, your own bits of ephemera or memories, perhaps some photographs and we’ll create little vegetable and flower patches of happiness and sunshine all captured in a little book that you can keep with you always.
Sketchbook Diaries
This workshop comes from the author of ‘The Diary of an Artist in Lockdown’.
Learn ways, and some tricks, to document your life visually, using collage, hand lettering illustration, maps and so much more.
This packed workshop will give you the confidence to start recording not just the wonderful things that happen in life, but also the small details and the tricky moments.
We all know journalling is good for our souls and peace of mind but not everyone can sit and write, some of us want to include drawings and some of us speak in images rather than with words.
We’ll also cover sketchbook nerves and how to overcome that first mark on the page.
If you can draw, think you can’t draw, haven’t drawn for a while, then this workshop is for you. All levels welcome, everyone will learn something and take away a sketchbook and a head full of ideas!
Hidden Stories
Create an artists’ book using ephemera and visual clues to illustrate your short story. Bring a short story idea with you, whether it’s a journey along a walk, meander through a dream, or crime story, whatever you like.
We’ll take that story and use visual prompts, to accompany, explain, embellish and add clues to your story. We can include hidden secrets, pop up surprises, layers of intrigue, letters of mystery, building pages with hand made ephemera that take your reader in a circuitous route to the end whether that’s the end of a walk, the crime solves, or perhaps you’ll leave your reader aimlessly wandering around on a moor not sure what to do next! You can include teasers, wrong turnings in your plot or just go underground to find new worlds in your small book with packed pages.
This is a journey to discover your own imagination. Whether you start with a murder mystery plot or a walk around the park, we’ll embroider the stories into exciting hand made artists’ books.
Map Making –
Take a Line for a Walk
Take a Line for a Walk in this mapping workshop with Inksmith Christine Nicholls of Inkpot & Pen.
Bring an imaginative or real journey with you, design and create your own linear map with a cartouche and compass rose, finishing the workshop by binding your map into an artists’ concertina book. Christine works as both an illustrator and lettering artist, and will guide and support students throughout the workshop to create a unique personal map.
You can bring any idea with you; perhaps you’d like to record an enjoyable day, a secret walk, a holiday with all its memories, or the dream of a perfect garden. We’ll bring those ideas and memories to life. Bring any kind of reference materials along, be it newspaper cuttings, tickets or photos on your phone and your creative spirit.
Playful Lettering
Walk beside me into the world of lettering.
Let’s play and draw the shapes the proper grown ups call letters!
In this workshop you’ll be introduced to some modern day handwriting and calligraphy styles, as well as visiting a couple of traditional styles with a modern twist.
We’ll explore and learn how your sitting position and holding the pen can make a difference, which pens work with which styles and how to ground ourselves so that we are in control of our writing, not the other way around!
We’ll look at ways to embellish a style, make subtle alterations and how we can manipulate the letter shapes for sketchbooks, letters and envelopes so you build up a personal calligraphic alphabet that you’re confident scribing.
This may influence your own handwriting or you may use it as a calligraphic elements to accompany and work alongside your handwriting.
We will cover a lot, so you’ll be tired at the end of the day!
You won’t leave being calligraphers or lettering experts, you’ll leave with your rich style to work on and develop.
The workshop is designed for people who wish to explore, play and improve their hand lettering style. It is not a calligraphy class with hours of drills, it’s very much a taster class of what you can achieve with play.